Balancing - Physical (Purpose), Mental (Meaning), Spiritual (Hope) and Emotional (Belonging)

 I am in the process of relooking at my spirituality and my faith that I too can recover.  I felt stung by another fellow's honest reflection that my thinking / spiritual belief that God could but would God for me? is like a newcomer.  

I have been pondering faith and hope a lot in the last week – since last Sunday’s 100 pound panel at the Region 8 convention.  I feel all in progress and a bit disoriented.  I decided to try more meetings and I have somewhat unofficially decided to try 90 meetings in 90 days.  I am not at all confident that I will keep with this but for today, I am doing another meeting.  So I am at day six and meeting six. 

I just finished a new-to-me meeting this morning and it was a unique format, one I found very helpful.  They focus on recovery as balancing the physical, mental (thinkin), spiritual and emotional health as four quadrants where we try to live in the sparkling centre with our HP.  

The meeting script talked about how physical health gives us purpose, mental health gives meaning, spiritual health yields hope and emotional health creates belonging.  I was at a meeting on Friday night where the speaker shared how his ‘dependency needs’ were not being met so he filled them with compulsive over eating.  I’d never heard that expression before and my initial reaction was “I don’t want to be dependent on anything, that’s unsafe and unreliable!”  And then he shared the exact same belief, before he found more lasting recovery.  LOL.  Yep.  I need (and want) to build more trust that I am and can be dependent on my HP and the sense of hope that creates.  

The writing / meditation prompts were to consider all four quadrants of the circle and consider:

• Take note of your reflections and then develop them as you meditate and think about your reflections from each of the four perspectives.   For instance, in this way of looking at things, our emotional health can be indicated by our feeling of belonging or reflections from our attitude.
• Our physical aspect is related to how we may do things, or our way of being and way of doing and our wholeness as a person.
• Our mental wellness can be measured in our capacity to understand our friends and neighbours, or ideas, such as those presented in books or even in society in general. We have a certain level of intuition or have a chosen rationale for our chosen lifestyle.
• Our spiritual wellness is found in our sense of hope and on what we base our beliefs, our values and on what we chose to identify ourselves with. 
• Mental wellness creates meaning, physical wellness creates purpose, spiritual wellness creates hope, and emotional wellness creates belonging.
• These are just examples to help start the process. They are not marked in stone but merely suggestions. 

It was a bit complex as the instructions were to focus on the Voices of Recovery reading for today, make notes for each of the four quadrants in our life today coming from the reading, and then do a five minute meditation on that!!!   

I felt like this is a useful way to work and yet it was a bit fast for my first time hearing it all for me to take it up in any detail.  I found myself correlating the four quadrants to my past (feeling like I didn’t belong / emotional pain), my present (health concerns / lack of purpose), my future (preoccupation in depression/anxiety worrying things will not get better – that life has little meaning), and lastly spiritual health where I have doubt instead of hope more than is needed / true. 

Blessed.